NOLA Church Plant

I got to hang out with mom this weekend!  She is down in New Orleans with a group from our home church doing some missions work this week.  They got into town on Sunday and will be in NOLA until Saturday.  Grace Fellowship has a partnership with the NOLA Church Plant and sends mission teams down a couple times a year to do physical work with local families and schools and also to do work with the homeless population in the French Quarter.

NOLA Church Plant was started after Hurricane Katrina by Alf and Allison Nelson from Grace (originally from NOLA) and two other couples from NOLA who felt God pulling at there hearts to come back to New Orleans and start a church while NOLA was in its rebuilding effort after the hurricane.  Check out their website.  They have a very cool thing going.  NOLA CHURCH PLANT

I joined the team from TN on Sunday evening.  We got to work early on Monday morning working to remove some old, moldy sheetrock from the walls of a lunch room at the Capdau Charter middle school in the Gentilly neighborhood.  The NOLA Church Plant uses the space on Sundays for their weekly gathering.  It is pretty incredible to see how poor of shape the building is in, especially to be used as a school.  Most Charter Schools in New Orleans are publicly funded but privately ran.  They are severely under resourced.  The conditions the kids and teachers have to deal with are pretty bad and this is the case all over the city.  We were told that the building the school was previously in was at least 10x worse than this one, which they moved into this year.  In addition to the moldy sheetrock, much of the wood framing in the building has been completely eaten up by termites.  We took all the sheetrock off the walls on Monday and started cleaning the brick walls to get rid of the mold.  The rest of the week, the group will work on some patchwork, trimming, cleaning, painting, and repairing a hole in the ceiling.  Here are a couple of action shots.

Obviously this weekend was also Mardi Gras.  We went to a couple parades yesterday and today.  I will post some pictures soon.